Truly Devious

Stevie goes into shock, and Larry leads her away from the scene. He asks Stevie to explain what they were doing in the tunnel and why Hayes was there alone, but Stevie doesn’t know. Larry takes her back to Minerva, and although Stevie always wanted to see a body, she didn’t want to see “a real someone” (229). At Minerva, Pix and Larry ask her not to tell the other students anything but to go straight to her room. Stevie obeys, and in her room, she starts writing down the details about what she saw and remembers about the events leading up to that moment.

David comes to her room and begins to ask her about what happened, but Stevie sends him away and refuses to answer his questions. She remembers how she was the one who broke the lock to get into the tunnel, and she worries that she might have been partially responsible for Hayes’s death. Larry takes Stevie and Nate to the Great House an hour later to be questioned by investigators, and Stevie coaches Nate through his anxiety by giving him all of the advice she can think of. She encourages him to speak honestly and not embellish the story, and Larry remarks that Stevie is handling all of this very well.